In addition to interviewing other people about their travels and travel-expertise, one joy of the Deviate podcast is the opportunity it affords me to reflect on my own best travel experiences – often with the very people who went on those journeys with me many years ago.
My five favorite Deviate episodes about my own life-changing travel experiences are outlined below. Other Deviate favorites include the experience of taking the Trans-Siberian train across Russia, my attempt to infiltrate the set of a travel-themed Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand, and my best hotel experience ever, in Cairo. But the five travel experiences that follow are perhaps to most formative and life-affecting of the stories I’ve shared on the podcast thus far.
Van Life before #VanLife: Rolf unpacks his very first vagabonding journey
This episode belongs at the top of the list — if nothing else because this 1994 van journey around North America (taken at a time well before the #VanLife movement) was where my vagabonding career began. At the time, I thought this eight-month post-university road trip would scratch my travel itch and allow me to begin my workaday professional life in America; in practice, it made me realize how safe, inexpensive, and enjoyable long-term travel could be. It very much lit the fire for the global journeys I still seek to this day.
Joining me in this episode was Jeff Nienaber, my longtime friend, and my travel companion for that original van journey. Unlike me, Jeff didn’t spend the ensuing decades traveling the world; instead, he settled down in Seattle, got married, and began a standard (and satisfying) American work-life. Thus, my conversation with him doesn’t just delve into the joys and challenges of taking one’s first vagabonding trip in one’s twenties — it shows how the pleasures of long-term travel can enhance anyone’s life, regardless of whether or not one goes on to settle down in one place, or continues to travel the world in the manner of a “digital nomad.”
Life changing travel experiences: Jumping freight trains in the Pacific NW
In the summer of 1992 my friend Brian Hartenstein and I jumped freight trains across the Pacific Northwest. It was, in retrospect, a difficult, dirty, and dangerous endeavor (as freight-train-jumping remains to this day), and it’s one of the most memorable experiences of my early travel career. It was perhaps not as life-changing as the North American van journey mentioned above, but it was certainly a unique adventure — one that Brian and I analyze in often-hilarious detail here.
Life changing travel experiences: Epiphanies of expatriate life in Korea
When I give lectures about travel, I usually trace my vagabonding career to the van trip mentioned above, but just as important — especially in terms of the international journeys that defined my late twenties and early thirties — was my two year experience of teaching English in Busan, South Korea. In addition to earning me money to fund onward travels, this experience gave me an immersive perspective on what it was like to live and work in a culture unlike my own. Joining me for the conversation are my old friends Steve Fuller and Brian Hartenstein, whose lives were also transformed by the experience of living and working in Korea as young men.
Life-changing travel experiences: China and Mongolia with my parents
In the summer of 2001 I met my parents, George and Alice Potts, in Beijing, and embarked with them on a train trip across northern China into Mongolia — an experience we still talk about, with wonder and enthusiasm, to this day. For all of my various travel-companions over the years, few have been as curious and open-hearted as my parents, and I learned a lot from traveling with them (even though I was, at the time, far more experienced than them at traveling in Asia). This episode will make a good listen for anyone considering the joys of traveling with family.
Life changing travel experiences (with Ari Shaffir): Walking across Israel
One of the most memorable experiences of my early travel career (one that I somehow have never managed to properly write about) was the time I walked across Israel, Jesus-style, in the spring of 2000. Joining me in this podcast conversation is the comedian Ari Shaffir, a veteran traveler (and frequent Deviate guest) who, having grown up an Orthodox Jew, spent a couple years of his own youth living and traveling in Israel. As is always the case when I talk to Ari, this conversation covers rich travel themes that extend beyond our experiences in Israel itself.
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